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Since the fall of the House of Enron, Republicans have been polishing
their populist patter. George W. Bush cast aside his patron, Enron CEO
Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay, and proclaimed himself the champion of executive
rectitude. When the Corporate and Auditing Accountability Act passed in
the House, Republican Richard Baker crowed, "We have taken action. We
have stood up to Wall Street."

This crowd has no shame. The bill--which lobbyists for big-five
accounting firm Deloitte and Touche praised for not going
"overboard"--fails to ban accountants from peddling consulting work to
the companies they audit, fails to shut the revolving door between
accountants and the companies they audit and fails to create an
accounting oversight board with subpoena power and independence. As
Representative John LaFalce noted, "The opportunity to enact meaningful
reform had been passed, eluded and avoided."

The House pension bill was even more disgraceful. As Representative
George Miller noted, it "doesn't deal with the lessons of Enron." It
doesn't put employees on the boards of their pension funds, doesn't
guard workers against biased investment advice and doesn't require
immediate notification of large stock sales by high-level
executives. Worse, it carves a huge new loophole in pension protections,
and as Daniel Halperin, a pension law expert at Harvard Law School,
notes, it will "basically gut" current rules that protect average and
low-wage workers. After Enron, where twenty-eight executives walked off
with more than $1 billion while workers watched their retirement savings
vanish, the Republican version of reform will make it easier for the big
guys to pocket lavish benefits while the workers get stiffed. The
provision, no surprise, was championed by the business lobby and
supported by Bill Thomas, the corporate bag man who chairs the House
Ways and Means Committee.

Republicans are certain that token reforms and stentorian rhetoric will
give them cover while they continue to bank the contributions of a
grateful financial and business community. Many Democrats
opportunistically voted for the Republican bills after their tougher
reforms were voted down on virtual party line votes.

Now the Republican "reforms" head to the Senate, where Democrats are in
control, but Enron conservatives in both parties are legion. Ted Kennedy
offers a real alternative on pension reform, but Democratic finance
committee chairman Max Baucus is already talking about a compromise bill
that would accept much of the corporate agenda.

Meanwhile, House and Senate conferees are putting the finishing touches
on a bankruptcy bill pushed by the credit card industry; it will make it
much harder for working people to get a fresh start at a time when
millions are losing their jobs. Democratic Senate leaders could (but
probably won't) demonstrate their solidarity with working people by
burying the bankruptcy bill instead of passing it. The power of money,
alas, speaks to both parties.

Millions of Americans are appalled by the bilking of Enron's workers.
And millions are concerned about their own pension savings. Progressives
and labor should raise hell about sham reforms that actually help the
big guys screw their workers. If Enron conservatives in both parties are
exposed, voters might show them this fall that they are paying more
attention than anyone thought.

California GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon Jr. has portrayed
himself as a savvy businessman who can deal successfully with the
state's financial woes. But Simon's ties to Enron, the bankrupt energy
company that has been charged with manipulating the electricity market
in California and is under federal investigation, raise questions about
his business acumen and his fitness for the state's top post.

Former business associates of Simon say that he personally persuaded
Enron to invest in Hanover Compressor, a Houston company he founded in
1990 and on whose board he sat between 1992 and 1998. Hanover makes
pumps that move natural gas and oil through pipelines and from wells.
According to several people at Enron and Hanover involved in the
transaction, the Enron investment was made in 1995 through an Enron
partnership called Joint Energy Development Investments, or JEDI, which
is now at the center of the federal investigation into Enron's collapse.

Simon held a 1.4 percent stake in Hanover, which after the JEDI
investment was worth tens of millions of dollars. His father, William
Simon, the former energy czar and Treasury Secretary under Richard
Nixon, ran a private investment firm, William E. Simon & Sons,
which owns more than 4 percent of Hanover. The younger Simon declined
requests for an interview. He has previously dodged questions about his
relationship with Enron.

JEDI was at one time Hanover's second-largest shareholder, with an $84
million stake in the company, according to a Securities and Exchange
Commission filing. Last June, JEDI shifted most of its shares to another
off-balance-sheet Enron partnership. JEDI's stake in Hanover allowed the
Enron executives who managed JEDI to attend Hanover board meetings.
Hanover executives said Simon and Enron came up with several
joint-venture ideas.

Simon was also involved in Hanover in matters separate from the Enron
deals that could raise legal concerns. Hanover said in February that it
would have to restate its financial results beginning in January 2000
because of improper accounting for a partnership that--as with
Enron--made the company appear more profitable than it was. Over several
years during this time, according to the Wall Street Journal,
Hanover officers sold millions of shares of stock--again much like
Enron, where officers who were allegedly aware of the company's
accounting practices were encouraging employees and others to buy shares
even as they were selling their own. Hanover is now the target of at
least four class-action lawsuits by shareholders who have alleged the
company misled investors; and it is also under investigation by the SEC.

Simon wasn't a member of Hanover's board at the time of the improper
accounting, but a week before Hanover made the announcement, the company
reported that every annual report it has issued since going public in
1997 contained errors. Simon, as a member of Hanover's audit committee,
was responsible for approving the company's annual reports. The audit
committee, according to Hanover's investor relations department, was
held responsible by Hanover for the error.

Simon helped Hanover set up a partnership in the Cayman Islands, Hanover
Cayman Limited, as a tax shelter. In addition, he assisted Hanover in
setting up a joint venture with Enron and JEDI to construct a
natural-gas compression project in Venezuela.

Jamie Fisfis, Simon's campaign spokesman, said Simon has been
forthcoming about his business dealings with Hanover and Enron. But when
asked about JEDI's investment in Hanover and what role Simon played,
Fisfis said he did not know and would only confirm that Simon was a
member of the Hanover board at the time. Moreover, he could not offer an
explanation when asked about the other joint ventures with Enron that
Simon's former business associates said he had a hand in creating. Simon
has told reporters on the campaign trail that he was barely involved in
Hanover's business activities, but Hanover executives say Simon was
intimately involved during his six years on the board. When Simon left
the board in 1998, he sold most of his 430,000 shares in the company.
However, he still has more than $1 million invested in Hanover,
according to the Associated Press.

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior scholar of the University of Southern
California's School of Policy, Planning and Development, said Simon has
to start answering questions about his dealings with Enron, "whether it
be good or bad," or risk alienating voters. "The symbol that Enron has
become is negative, cheating and ruthless."

Roger Salazar, a spokesman for Governor Gray Davis, who currently trails
Simon according to the latest polls, said Simon's close ties with Enron
pose questions about his track record: "For a man who touts himself as a
business manager, these types of activities raise questions whether
that's true."

It's hard to imagine a tale of corporate mischief that would shock veteran observers of the US tobacco industry. But even the most jaded reader may raise an eyebrow at the allegations reported on page 11 that major American tobacco companies smuggled cigarettes and laundered money on a vast scale, defying US and foreign law and defrauding foreign governments of hundreds of millions in tax revenues before engineering a rewrite of the USA Patriot Act last fall to shield themselves from international liability. For this special report, the result of an investigation by The Nation, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and NOW With Bill Moyers--with support from the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute--journalist Mark Schapiro traveled to Colombia, whose state governments are suing the companies in US court, to assess the charges and to inspect the scene of the alleged smuggling operations. (NOW airs its investigative report on April 19.)

The Bush Administration ought to cooperate with authorities in Colombia and other countries in their efforts to hold US corporations accountable. It should support legislation to establish clearly the principle of jurisdiction in US courts over allegations of wrongdoing by American companies overseas. And the Justice Department should launch an investigation into the activities of US tobacco firms in Colombia to determine whether laws were broken and prosecution is warranted. It is important for the rest of us to raise the political cost of inaction. Republicans in Congress and in the White House may one day realize that with friends like Philip Morris, they don't need enemies.

The Enron "outrage," AFL-CIO president John Sweeney told a rapt crowd of several hundred workers at Milwaukee's Serb Memorial Hall, is "not the story of one corporation's abuses, but sadly it's an example of business as usual in boardrooms and executive suites all across the country." Over the coming months, at a series of town-hall meetings around America, the AFL-CIO will warn workers that they, too, could be "Enroned," and it will call for "no more business as usual."

In an unprecedented way, argues AFL-CIO corporate affairs director Ron Blackwell, the Enron scandal "opens up a channel of public discourse on issues of retirement security and corporate accountability." In the booming nineties nobody wanted to hear why corporations and capital markets had to be better regulated, and reformers were left pleading for corporations to be "socially responsible." But today, "new economy" job-hoppers as much as steelworkers have good reasons to listen to union warnings about deeply flawed 401(k) plans and Social Security privatization.

The labor movement helped win millions in severance pay for laid-off Enron workers, provided legal counsel for workers battling Enron's creditors, sued Enron executives (through union-affiliated Amalgamated Bank) on behalf of pension funds that lost hundreds of millions of dollars in Enron's collapse and helped ex-Enron workers--both union and nonunion--tell Congress and the public how they were misused. The AFL-CIO requested new Securities and Exchange Commission rules and forced four Enron directors to withdraw from renomination at other corporate and public boards. Now labor is challenging Enron director Frank Savage's renomination to Lockheed Martin's board, sending the message that independent directors have a public trust.

Besides supporting auditor reform, the AFL-CIO is promoting legislation to strengthen the rights of workers in 401(k) plans--to a point. Senator Jon Corzine, backed by the Pension Rights Center, initially proposed prohibiting employees from holding more than 20 percent of their employer's stock in their plans. But after complaints from unions representing some workers who had bet big with their employers' stock, like pilots and GE employees, the AFL-CIO backed Senator Ted Kennedy's legislation, which places a less stringent limit on the employees' 401(k) holdings of their employers' stock but which, quite importantly, would require equal worker and employer representation in governing the plans. Enron worker Dary Ebright, who lost $300,000 from his 401(k), argues that limits make sense. "If that had been in place," he said in Milwaukee, "I wouldn't be here today."

Sweeney hopes that unions can use votes on Enron-related reforms to draw lines in this year's elections showing what candidates put first--corporations or workers. The AFL-CIO attacked Republican Representative John Boehner's legislation, passed in April, for "wip[ing] out existing retirement protections for workers under the guise of responding to" Enron. The House bill would permit investment firms to advise workers about financial products, like mutual funds, from which those firms profit--precisely the kind of 1990s conflict of interest that is under investigation at several Wall Street brokerages. While providing limited protections for workers and preserving executive privileges, the House bill would also make it easier for corporations to exclude most employees from retirement plans. Labor's advocacy for Enron workers and retirement security could also strengthen organizing, including efforts among white-collar workers, by sparking a more "enlightened" view of a collective voice at work, as it did with former Enron vice president Dennis Vegas, now a union enthusiast.

But a budding labor scandal threatens the movement's credibility on corporate accountability. It appears that a few labor leaders, sitting on the board of ULLICO, parent of Union Labor Life Insurance Company, personally profited from privileged deals in the Enronlike boom and bust of telecommunications upstart Global Crossing, while their unions' pension funds were denied the same opportunity. Robert Georgine, president of ULLICO and former president of the AFL-CIO's building and construction trades department, former Iron Workers president Jake West, Plumbers president Martin Maddaloni and Carpenters president Douglas McCarron are among those who got windfalls of several hundred thousand dollars. In March Sweeney, who did not take part in the deal, called on ULLICO, like Enron, to appoint an independent committee and counsel to investigate, but in mid-April Georgine said he would take a "somewhat different" approach. "We're not going to ask Enron to live by one set of standards and ULLICO to live by another," Sweeney insisted. Many union officials say they were shocked and disgusted by the news, a reminder that "no more business as usual" is a widely applicable slogan, even within union ranks.

Six weeks ago, The Nation called for Army Secretary Tom White's resignation. White, former vice chairman of an Enron Ponzi scheme called Enron Energy Services (EES) was self-evidently not fit to bring sound business practices to the Pentagon. Since then, new revelations have created a bill of particulars against White serious enough to warrant probes by a federal grand jury and the Defense Department's Inspector General. White has stated that "if I ever get to the point...where the Enron business represents a major and material distraction...I wouldn't stay." That point has come. If White does not resign, he must be fired. The recent revelations show that White continues to practice the same squirrelly ethics that made Enron infamous. Since becoming Army Secretary, he has:

§ infuriated Republican Senator John Warner and Democrat Carl Levin of the Armed Services Committee by masking the full range of his Enron holdings;

§ violated his pledge to divest himself of those holdings, in accordance with ethics guidelines. After requesting an extension to sell his 405,710 shares, he finished dumping them in October, after a flurry of calls to executives at Enron and just before the SEC's public announcement of a formal investigation of the company, which caused the stock to tank. This has made White a target of a grand jury probe on insider trading. White says he was just commiserating with his former friends about Enron's troubles;

§ concealed those supposedly innocent contacts with Enron executives, failing to include them in response to a request by Representative Henry Waxman. White claims that he forgot to include the calls from his home phone;

§ misused a military plane to fly his wife and himself to Aspen, Colorado, where he completed the sale of his $6.5 million vacation house. This earned him an Inspector General's review of his past travel. Military transport is available only for official duty. White claims he had official business in Dallas and Seattle and that Aspen was directly between the two. He also states that he was required to fly a military plane as part of the Bush Administration's secretive continuity-in-government plan, which apparently requires top officials to fly military aircraft to resorts where they maintain mansions.

The more we learn of White's past at Enron, the worse it gets. EES cooked the books to register immediate earnings and profits, when in fact it was suffering hundreds of millions in losses--most of which were then secreted in Enron's notorious accounting scams. White has claimed that he knew nothing about improprieties at EES. But former EES employees interviewed by Dow Jones Newswires affirm that White was part of the scam. He signed off on the EES contracts that produced immediate paper profits and long-term real losses. He urged the sales force to make the company look like it was making money. He even participated in the notorious Potemkin Village trading floor, a fake trading room that EES threw together to impress visiting stock analysts. And then White walked off with millions, while investors were fleeced and the workers discarded. For conservative military analyst Eliot Cohen this alone is grounds for White's resignation, because he cannot profess the core military ethic of "mission" and "men" before self since "he was an integral part of an organization that violated those principles."

These days George W. Bush scarcely remembers his leading political patron, Enron CEO Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay. The President now poses as a champion of corporate accountability, calling for executives to be held personally responsible for their companies' financial statements. Yet he hasn't held his own Army Secretary personally responsible for his fraudulent actions at Enron and his misdeeds as Army Secretary. If White doesn't have the grace to go, he should be dismissed. The Army and the country would be better served if he defended himself from scandals past and present on his own time and with his own dime.

On the eve of George W. Bush's recent tour of Latin America, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes equated the advantages of a global free market with the peaks of the Himalayas, characterizing them as summits so inaccessible that the poor cannot even see them, let alone scale them. Fifteen years of US-prescribed free markets and trade liberalization in Latin America have generated an average annual growth rate of only 1.5 percent, far short of the 4 percent needed to make a serious dent in poverty levels. Add to that the Mexican peso meltdown of 1994, economic stagnation in Central America, the Brazilian currency crisis of three years ago, the political and economic collapse of Peru, endless war in Colombia, coup jitters in Venezuela and the staggering crash in Argentina, and one can understand Fuentes's pessimism.

"Trade means jobs," Bush said as he met with regional leaders and promised a harvest of benefits from his proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)--a thirty-two-nation pact Washington hopes to implement by 2005. But for all Bush's talk of a prosperous hemispheric future, his policy initiatives are mired in a cold war past. The Administration has just anointed a former Oliver North networker and interventionist hawk, Otto Reich, to head the State Department's Latin America section. And much as in the days of the Reagan wars in Central America that Reich helped promote, the Bushies seem to believe that the region's ills are better solved by guns than butter. No sooner had Washington signed off on the sale of a new fleet of F-16s to Chile (ending a two-decade ban on sophisticated-weapons sales to Latin America) than the Administration began asking Congress to increase military aid to Colombia and to lift all restrictions on its use. Those critics who argued that the $1.3 billion antidrug "Plan Colombia" would suffer mission creep and inevitably morph into a prolonged counterinsurgency war are now seeing their darkest fears confirmed.

On the economic front, Bush offered little more than warmed-over trickle-down Reaganomics to a continent in desperate need of a lift from the bottom up (the three countries he visited--Mexico, Peru and El Salvador--all suffer poverty rates of 50 percent or more). Certainly not lost on his Latin American audiences was the one-sided nature of the free trade offered by Bush. For nearly two decades now, Latin Americans have been told that by adhering to the "Washington Consensus" of market liberalization they will be able to partake of the rich American pie. But the cold fact is that the US market has remained closed to a cornucopia of Latin American goods.

Some remedy was found in the past decade's Andean Trade Preference Act, designed to lure impoverished Latin Americans away from local drug economies by allowing them to freely export a list of 4,000 goods into the United States. But since ATPA expired last year, the Senate and the White House have balked at its reauthorization because of protectionist pressure from conservative, primarily Southern, textile and agriculture interests. Its reinstatement could shift 100,000 farmers in Peru alone from coca to cotton cultivation.

Washington's refusal to depart from such unequal and inflexible models has--unwittingly--provoked some positive alternative stirrings. The use of armored cars and tear gas barrages in downtown Lima during the US-Peruvian presidential meeting was an official acknowledgment of the growing restlessness with the status quo. Newly elected President Alejandro Toledo has seen his popularity plummet to 25 percent as he has failed to offer economic alternatives. In Brazil center-left candidate Luiz Ignacio "Lula" Da Silva leads in this fall's presidential polls and vows to block the FTAA if elected. Even the incumbent, more conservative, President Enrique Cardoso has begun to steer Brazil toward more independence from Washington. It's still too early to predict how the developing debacle in Argentina will play out.

Finally, El Salvador, where Bush ended his Latin American tour, couldn't have provided a more fitting showcase for the current disjuncture between Washington and its southern neighbors. During the 1980s the United States was willing to spend billions to fight a war against leftist insurgents and promised a bright, democratic future. That conflict was settled ten years ago with a pact that opened up the political system but did nothing to address the social ills that provoked the war in the first place. And once the guerrillas were disarmed, Washington lost interest; in the past decade US aid has been reduced to a paltry $25 million a year. Today El Salvador languishes with vast unemployment, radical economic disparities and a murder rate forty times higher than that of the United States.

Democrats like California Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa are probably right when they claim that Bush's trip was aimed more at luring the domestic Latino vote than at building bridges to the South. During his 2000 campaign, Bush excoriated Bill Clinton for squandering a chance to improve relations with Latin America. But now Bush seems to be following in that same sorry tradition.